Tracking technology may be used to track end user behavior for the purposes of providing compensation to third parties and/or providing analytics to advertisers. Such analytics may be used to target advertising and/or help determine the effectiveness of particular advertising campaigns, advertisement publishers, and/or advertising networks. If the subject matter of the advertisement is a software application, it is particularly useful to know if a user who clicked on the advertisement for the software application also downloaded and installed the software application. It is also useful to know how the end user uses the software application.
Unfortunately, currently available methods of tracking downloads, installations, and usage of a software application by a user of an end user computing device are technically inadequate. Some methods require the storage of a cookie on the device and/or using JavaScript code to interrogate the user's device. U.S. Patent Publication No. 2012/0278186 describes one such exemplary method. Technical difficulties arise when attempting to use such a method on an end user computing device such as an iPhone, an Android Phone, a Windows Phone, and/or other types of smartphones. For example, most such end user computing devices “sandbox” each application, thereby preventing applications from storing persistent data accessible to other applications on the same device. Many end user computing devices may also limit the execution of executable code such as JavaScript that is downloaded by a web browser or other advertisement displaying application.
While these limitations on accessing device functionality can improve the security and privacy of end user computing devices, they make it technically challenging for legitimate actors to track end user behavior. For example, a first application may be prevented from storing information about a clicked advertisement on the end user computing device in a way that a second application publicized in the advertisement and later installed or executed can access. Accordingly, tracking functionality included in the second application has no way of obtaining information from local storage regarding the advertisement that led to its install or execution.
Methods of tracking end user clicks and matching them to subsequent application installations (and usage) that avoid using cross-application or inter-process communication on the end user computing device and/or using executable code downloaded with an advertisement to interrogate the user's device are desirable.
Further, many users do not exclusively interact with advertisers via a single end user computing device. For example, many advertisers provide the ability for their customers/users to interact with them via both a first end user computing device that presents a traditional web page and separately via a second end user computing device that executes a mobile application.
For example, a user may be a loyal user of a retail department store website from their desktop computer. A retail department store is used herein as an example advertiser, but could stand in for any other type of business that tracks their advertising using a tracking system. The retail department store may want to encourage users to install their mobile app on their mobile computing device so they can engage with them more, and so that the users may have a better experience when interacting with them via their mobile computing devices than by displaying the desktop website via a mobile browser. Accordingly, the retail department store may present ads on their desktop website (or via one or more ad publishers) that recommend for them to install their mobile application.
Subsequently, the user could go to the app store on their desktop computing device, and the app would then be pushed to their mobile computing device. The user may be directed to the app store by the advertisement by clicking a tracking link to the app store associated with the advertisement. Alternatively, from their mobile computing device, the user could simply use the app store and directly install the mobile app using the mobile computing device. If the user does interact with the ad on the desktop computer but then uses the app store on the mobile computing device to install the application, previously disclosed tracking systems would not be able to attribute the install back to the publisher of the ad presented on the desktop (cross device attribution). Technical problems exist in that the existing tracking systems do not have access to the information required to associate the install of the application on the mobile computing device to the advertisements presented on the desktop computing device.
Another common scenario is that the retail department store discussed above may wish to start acquiring users via advertising for their mobile app. A portion of the users that would be encouraged to install the mobile app in response to the advertising campaigns may already be loyal users of the website, and thus existing users for the company. Existing systems for tracking advertising performance and application installs do not allow for the separate tracking of installations for users who previously had user accounts with a content provider versus installations for users who are new to the content provider, because only the content provider (and not the tracking systems) have had access to user account record data for the content provider.
The present application provides these and other advantages as will be apparent from the following detailed description and accompanying figures.